Oracle's Hurd: Sluggish BRICs hurting IT

Live from the Oracle Open World in San Francisco, Mark Hurd, Oracle president, explains Oracle's focus on cloud computing. "We will spend over $5 billion this year on research and development," he says.

Reduced demand for information technology has hit the sector like a ton of bricks. Actually, make that BRICs.

"One thing that has hurt IT has been the BRIC countries," Oracle's co-president, Mark Hurd, told CNBC on Monday, referring to Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are all deemed to be developing markets for business.

Over the last several years, however, the BRICs had provided considerable demand growth to the IT space, Hurd said.

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A recent increase in its sales force has helped Oracle have "good performance" in Europe, Hurd said, but the European market overall has been "flattish at best."

Asked by CNBC's Maria Bartiromo about the technology company's latest quarter, in which it missed on revenue, Hurd downplayed the criticisms. Hurd noted that while the IT market has been tight, the company has still been able to post growth in everything from licensed software to databases and cloud computing.

"We haven't seen great growth broadly across IT, but within the context of that, we gained share and realistically, we can't change the macro that we're handed, but within it, we can gain share," Hurd said.

Going forward, Hurd said his company will focus on investing in its employees by way of training and improving efficiencies as well as innovation and distribution.